Turning round the telescope. Centre-right parties and immigration and integration policy in Europe1

1. Thanks to Martin Schain for helpful comments and to Jeremy Richardson for guidance through the editorial process.

Abstract

Because those who study migration do not focus much on parties, while those who study parties tend to focus on migration only insofar as it affects electoral competition and positioning, the role of political parties in immigration control and integration policy is underestimated. Parties on the centre-right, which have enjoyed nowhere near the attention devoted to their more radical counterparts, are particularly important and interesting in this respect. They make up many European governments and therefore help to determine state and EU policy. Maintaining their ownership of the issues involved makes electoral sense but their policies on control and integration are not purely, or at least primarily, a strategic response to the populist radical right; even before the rise of the latter, immigration and integration were matters of genuine ideological and practical concern for Europe's market liberal, conservative and Christian Democratic parties. Too hard a line, however, risks alienating their supporters in business and in civil society. It is a difficult balance, but one that makes a big difference both to the parties involved and the public policies they help to produce.

Keywords:

• Centre-right parties
• European
• immigration
• integration
• populist radical right

Notes

1. Thanks to Martin Schain for helpful comments and to Jeremy Richardson for guidance through the editorial process.

2. This issue began as a workshop in an ESRC-funded seminar series on the Contemporary Right in Europe which was organized out of the University of Sussex but which also met at University College London, and the Universities of Antwerp, Cambridge and Leiden, thanks to (among others) Sean Hanley, Steven Van Hecke and Sarah de Lange, Julie Smith and Petr Kopecky. Details can be found at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sei/1-4-9.html. Whether the relative neglect of the centre-right is due to what are widely assumed to be the more left-wing preferences of political scientists, or to the definitional problems surrounding a space in the political spectrum that is shared by a number of party families (the subject of another workshop in the series), is a moot point. Here we take a ‘big-tent’ approach: by centre or mainstream right we include market (but not social) liberal parties, Christian Democrats and conservative parties – in short, those party families (excluding Agrarian/Centre and Regionalist parties) which tend to score five or above on most expert surveys but which are not part of the populist radical right (or simply far-right) party family.

3. Anyone interested in reading the full text of the interview in January 1978 can find it at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid = 103485. At the time, it seemed clear to most observers that the remarks, inasmuch as they had a strategic purpose, as well as presaging what within a year or two became a government policy, were intended to target working-class Labour voters in general rather than those who were flirting with the National Front in particular (see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,948011,00.html).